I have recently had an exchange with Thomas Cagley on LinkedIn in response to an article “The Agile Mindset“.  Comments around emotional and organizational maturity were made and Thomas Cagley asked the questions about which one comes first.

I said I think emotional maturity must come first.  Without the ability to handle the “real” situation, you are unable to understand and resolve those things related to organizational maturity.  You must emotionally be able to handle the present situation then think clearly and grow the organization and build (hiring, coaching, process improvement) the maturity in areas that are immature.  In this case, we are referring to how well we perform those technical aspects of the organization such as product testing, requirements and configuration management, project management and manufacturing to name a few.  You can find an example outlined extensively in the CMMI model.

My experience suggests people often want what they want when they want it. We do not realize there are often dependencies or prerequisites required to reach that “what we want” objective, or we do not want to recognize these limitations.  Sometimes this is referred to as delayed gratification.  Without emotional maturity, it is difficult to think clearly, learn, plan the moves and do the required work to be in a position to achieve those organizational maturity objectives.  This work I would submit is the act of improving our organization’s maturity but could not have happened without emotional maturity.

We have edited this post to include this paragraph.  We have found this article and believe it applies to organizations as well as training organizations. In fact, in our work should consist of some educational aspects, Shawn P Quigley and Jon M Quigley are working on a book that weds the organization’s work and learning.  So when we found this article we decided we should include this article from USATestPrep and a growth mindset.

Organizational maturity is our capability it is where we improve how we do the work that will allow us to reach our goals.  Our emotional maturity allows us to consider the situation as it presently exists, and think of ways to make the situation better rather than stomp around complaining about what is – yelling at team members, and demanding the impossible not just the improbable.  Without emotional maturity, we can ask our team members to jump to the moon and expect that to happen (improbable).  Without patience that comes with emotional maturity, we are unable to plan, grow our people and coach the team to the organizational maturity we need to remain competitive.